Hao Hao ReportThe best China news and blog posts

I recently asked my Chinese friends how they thought Chairman Mao would react if he was suddenly brought back to life in the 21st century. “Not happy” and “Disappointed” were the most common answers that I received; I was not surprised by such responses. After all, it is difficult to find very many reasons to label China as communist these days. The ruling party in China still calls itself communist. The international media still likes to refer to China as a communist giant. But where is communism still manifested in China today?

China is not exactly the most communist place in the world, but one cab driver still believes that everyone should have nothing. Communism lives on!

China has plenty of reasons to be twitchy over a more active Russia. Its energy interests run counter to Russia's in Central Asia. China has long opposed the arguments that Russia is advancing to defend its actions in Georgia. Russian power in the Far East could hamper China's attempts to dominate, or at least lead, the region. And the two share a long history of conflict and competition.

A Chinese-Russian alliance is forming. The Chinese client state is North Korea; the Russian and Chinese trading partner is Iran. Like China, Russia is a capitalism-utilizing dictatorship with a history of Marxism and a belief in its eventual historical conquest. Like Russia, China is a Machiavellian political actor willing to play both sides of the Islamic-Western conflict against the middle. China and Russia are the global beneficiaries of the Islamic-Western clash of civilizations. They remain largely outside its purview while benefiting from its externalities.

The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) celebrated on Saturday evening the 59th anniversary of the founding of the New China, lending its unswerving support to China's pursuit of socialism.

Sidney Shapiro or 沙博理 has lived through Mao’s China into Hu’s China. Now in his 90’s, he enjoys a quiet life in his adopted home in Beijing. He is one of the few hundreds of ‘communist sympathisers’ (for lack of a better term) who joined the Communist Party’s effort in building the PRC. Most of them left China forced by circumstances. But Shapiro managed to stay.

Bush attends the opening ceremony to a bronze monument that denounces the "tens of millions" killed by communist regimes throughout history, and China gets uppity. Imagine that!

China just loves reciprocity. I wonder what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will do in return for this--maybe a monument to the innocent victims of the war on terror?

China set two more ambitious goals for its space program this week, announcing it will launch an unmanned lunar orbiter in the second half of 2007 and a probe to Mars by 2009, according to reports from the Xinhua news agency.

The lunar orbiter, scheduled to launch later this year, will take 3-D images of the moon's surface. If successful, it will pave the way for a lunar landing mission, Xinhua quoted National Space Administration director Sun Laiyan as saying Sunday in a speech at Beijing Jiaotong University.

Probably from the beginnings of the Cold War to its end, millions of people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe listened to the USIA´s radio flagship, the Voice of America (VoA). At least when compared to what people under direct or indirect Soviet rule...